It is 11:39 AM and I am completely worn out for the day. I doubt I will be able to accomplish anything else so I wanted to write down what I have done so far today. The day started out pretty rough since our Cocker Spaniel, Sadie, barked most of the night. I had to get up and let her in and out multiple times throughout the night. She barked to go outside when she was inside and then, when she went outside, she stood at the door and howled to come back inside. Each time, it jolted me awake out of a dead sleep because I was really tired from working in the garden the day before. It was really frustrating. After I woke up permanently at 4:30 AM and laid in bed trying to go back to sleep until the light started filtering through the window at 6 AM, I decided to finally get up at 6:15 AM and my first Redeem the Day moment occurred. I looked outside and the view out my window caught my attention. A soft fog was hovering above Green Acres. I stepped out on the porch and took a picture of the peaceful beauty enveloping our farm. Eventually, I woke up enough….after 2 cups of coffee….to go outside and face the day. Based on all weather forecasts, today was going to be an exceptionally hot day so I knew that I needed to water all of the animals and especially needed to water our huge garden with all of our watermelon plants, squash, and zinnias.

Cue first farm shenanigan. As I was walking outside to let our dogs out of the barn, I hadn’t even changed into my farm overalls yet, but I noticed that all of our dogs were on the other side of the goat pen. I was still wearing my inside, casual clothes and my HOKA slides and didn’t think anything about it. My mistake. I walked into the goat pen to get a closer look and that’s when it all started. I heard screaming that could only mean one thing. Our dogs had caught a piglet and, when people say someone screamed like a stuck pig, they mean screaming at the top of your lungs at a volume that causes your adrenaline to go through the roof. That is what a stuck pig sounds like. I immediately started yelling at the dogs and then rapidly started climbing over a 6 foot cattle pen that is wedged up against the side of the goat pen and then had to climb back down the other side, all the while losing one of my HOKA slides, throwing the bottom of the feeder I had in one hand ….and losing the fastener, and throwing a feed scoop that was in my other hand at the dogs. So, wearing one black HOKA slide and one checkered fuzzy sock, I ran towards the dogs dodging mesquite thorns to try to catch the piglet. The piglet was still alive, but had several places where it had been injured and I quickly grabbed it and dropped it over the fence and made sure it made it to safety. I then reprimanded the dogs very strongly. They were all hiding from me by the time I left. Then I had to climb back over the 6-foot high cattle pen walls with one shoe on and back down the other side into the goat pen because my other shoe was in the middle of the goat pen laying on the ground.

After that super special time with the animals, I proceeded to go into the garden and water about an acre of plants however, the hose would not connect to the other end of the one connected to the spigot, so after walking back and forth and inadvertently spraying myself in the face and all over my clothes, I commenced to fixing the situation and ended up dragging two 100 foot hoses all around the huge garden. I felt like I was doing an Iron Man workout for about an hour. In order to Redeem the Day (again!), I decided to take the time to weed and take extra care of all of the watermelon plants so that they would have more of a chance to survive the next week of extremely high temperatures in Central Texas.

At that point, I had decided I hate animals and I’m just going to focus my attention on plants from now on. It was so warm that, at one point I stopped watering and decided to soak my face and hair with water to cool off and, about that time, Farm Commotion #2 began. The dogs all started barking and running up to the gate and, low and behold, the UPS man was attempting to deliver some important paperwork that our youngest daughter had sent to the house to close the deal on her new car. Well, it was then that I noticed one of our Great Pyrenees guard dogs was on the OUTSIDE of the fence. There I was, inside the fenced off garden in the back of the property, with my face, hair, and overalls dripping with both sweat and water and I had a decision to make about how involved I was going to get in this situation. It was an easy decision at this point. I quickly hid behind our pigsty. 😉 I didn’t have an ounce of energy left and my trusty mode of transportation, the golf cart, is out of commission and there was no way I could walk up to the gate in time. I thought it was a solid decision on my part. I prayed he would leave the packet. Based on how long he sat there, he went back and forth about it for quite a while, but finally threw it down way on the outside edge of our entrance gate area and then took off down the road as fast as possible with our dog, Anna, chasing him down the road.

As was leaving the garden, I grabbed a couple of ripe blueberries and tucked them in my pocket….only to find them in my load of washed clothes later that afternoon. 

Finally, I closed up and chained all of the garden gates in the barn orchard so that no animals could get out, but I glanced and noticed that two baby goats had, somehow, squeezed out of their pen and into the alley. Thank goodness The Outdoorsman and I put an old gate at the end of the alley so nothing should be able to get the goats. I’m now resorting to prayer alone to save our animals by this point in my morning.

I was really struggling by the time I finished in the large barn orchard garden so I was going to head inside, but I realized I was so tired that I needed to push through so that I could rest for the remainder of the day. Plus, it was getting hot already. I knew that the hot, strong winds were going to pick up and the temperatures were going to be rising throughout the day, so I decided to keep pushing through to finish my farm chores. I walked over to our other fenced in garden, which has been doing amazingly well this year and has huge gorgeous plants of different kinds of squash, watermelon, and flowers. As I got a closer look at my prized garden, I noticed that a gopher had successfully dug a huge hole overnight right next to my watermelon plants and squash plants. I just put my head up in the air, prayed that God would protect my plants and decided that I would allow Him to redeem the day and take care of the gopher in whatever way He sees fit because I couldn’t catch a doodle bug (roly-poly for some of you!) if I tried at this point.

Farming is a matter of many things every single day: acceptance of daily hard work; forgiveness of yourself when you make a mistake; patience with your, oftentimes, difficult animals when they complicate your plans; and the ability to move on to the next project with hope in your heart. God allows us to redeem our time spent outside and rediscover joy in our hearts by giving us beauty and animals and butterflies and sunsets and green grass and flowers and full ponds and all the things we are blessed to see regularly here on Green Acres. Even though the work on our farm can be grueling and exhausting on a daily basis, I truly don’t think I could ever move back to the city. To be honest, I sorely underestimated the work of a farmer before I became a farmer myself. We are fortunate to farm our land purely for the enjoyment and the challenge and for extra income to help the farm pay for itself. We don’t have as much skin in the game as a full time farmer or rancher and I am thankful for that. Nevertheless, even when you are only doing it as a serious hobby or side hustle, it can be very challenging to keep your chin up in the midst of hard things such as animal deaths, bad weather, pests, snakes (they deserve their own category in my opinion), and all the things that make life on the farm difficult sometimes. Like I said earlier, there is so much beauty to see outside and there is a lot to be thankful for the outweighs the hard things. I am thankful for that and I know that God helps us to redeem each day by giving us beautiful things throughout the day. I am thankful for the indescribable beauty of country sunsets every night and baby animals being born on the farm every year. It all makes the daily struggle worthwhile.